It is with a heavy heart that I write to say that yesterday Spider Strategies lost a beloved member of our team, Kirby Kitson.

Kirby joined Spider in June 2011 as our Manager of Product Training. In this role, Kirby was very much the face of Spider to our customers: training them on our software, providing helpdesk support, and working to create or update Spider’s training materials so that they were easier for our customers to use.

Apple consistently gets high marks for customer service, so when I visit an Apple store my expectations are high. Very high. Maybe even too high, because each time I go I feel my experience could have been better. On my last visit, there was one thing in particular that I felt they could improve on: their serial numbers.

Let me explain. When I visited the store, I was immediately greeted by an Apple employee. I told him that my laptop's power cord had died. I expected he would tell me I needed an appointment to see a genius, but instead he started working with me right away to verify my power cord was the issue. Awesome! Once we established that, he went to selfsolve.apple.com to check on my warranty status. He typed in the serial number for my laptop and the system said my laptop was not under warranty, even though I knew that it was.

It's an exciting time in web development. New versions of web browsers come out all of the time, offering web designers tools that never existed in previous versions.

Yet it's always a balancing act. We want to use the latest whiz-bang functionality in our software, but we don't want to alienate customers who still have to use browsers that are a few years old. What is a software company to do?

We've created a page on our website that covers everything new in version 2.5. Most of the things you see there have already been covered in previous blog posts, but it's a nice one-page resource to see everything in one place.